One example of a "Black Swan" fund is Universa, which was founded by Mark Spitznagel and advised by Nicholas Taleb.[1][2] During the 2007 - 2008 financial crisis the fund posted returns of over 100%.[3] In August 2015, Universa Investments made more than $1 billion in profits in one week, representing a 20% YTD return.[4]

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Investment fund
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An investment fund is a way of investing money alongside other investors in order to benefit from the inherent advantages of working as part of a group. e. Lower transaction costs, increase the asset diversification to reduce some unsystematic risk, terminology varies with country but investment funds are often referred to as investment pools, collective investment vehicles, collective investment schemes, managed funds, or simply funds. The regulatory term is undertaking for collective investment in transferable securities, Investment funds are promoted with a wide range of investment aims either targeting specific geographic regions or specified industry sectors. Depending on the there is normally a bias towards the domestic market due to familiarity. Funds are often selected on the basis of these specified investment aims, their past investment performance, the term collective investment scheme is a legal concept deriving initially from a set of European Union Directives to regulate mutual fund investment and management. The basic aim of collective investment scheme regulation is that the products that are sold to the public are sufficiently transparent. Collective investment vehicles may be formed under company law, by legal trust or by statute, the nature of the vehicle and its limitations are often linked to its constitutional nature and the associated tax rules for the type of structure within a given jurisdiction. Typically there is, A fund manager or investment manager who manages the investment decisions, a fund administrator who manages the trading, reconciliations, valuation and unit pricing. A board of directors or trustees who safeguards the assets and ensures compliance with laws, regulations, the shareholders or unitholders who own the assets and associated income. A marketing or distribution company to promote and sell shares/units of the fund, please see below for general information on specific forms of vehicles in different jurisdictions. The net asset value or NAV is the value of a vehicles assets minus the value of its liabilities, the method for calculating this varies between vehicle types and jurisdiction and can be subject to complex regulation. An open-end fund is divided into shares which vary in price in direct proportion to the variation in value of the funds net asset value. Each time money is invested, new shares or units are created to match the prevailing price, each time shares are redeemed. In this way there is no supply or demand created for shares, a closed-end fund issues a limited number of shares in an initial public offering or through private placement. If shares are issued through an IPO, they are traded on an exchange or directly through the fund manager to create a secondary market subject to market forces. If demand for the shares is high, they may trade at a premium to net asset value, if demand is low they may trade at a discount to net asset value. Further share offerings may be made by the vehicle if demand is high although this may affect the share price, for listed funds, the added element of market forces tends to amplify the performance of the fund increasing investment risk through increased volatility. Some collective investment vehicles have the power to borrow money to further investments

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2007-2008 financial crisis
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Excessive risk-taking by banks such as Lehman Brothers helped to magnify the financial impact globally. Massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other monetary and fiscal policies were employed to prevent a possible collapse of the worlds financial system. The crisis was followed by a global economic downturn, the Great Recession. The European debt crisis, a crisis in the system of the European countries using the euro. The Dodd–Frank Act, was enacted in the US in the aftermath of the crisis to promote the stability of the United States. The Basel III capital and liquidity standards were adopted by countries around the world, the precipitating factor was a high default rate in the United States subprime home mortgage sector. The expansion of this sector was encouraged by the Community Reinvestment Act, many of these subprime loans were then bundled and sold, finally accruing to quasi-government agencies. The implicit guarantee by the US federal government created a moral hazard, because mortgage lenders could pass these mortgages on in this way, they could and did adopt loose underwriting criteria, and some developed aggressive lending practices. The accumulation and subsequent high rate of these mortgages led to the financial crisis. High mortgage approval rates led to a pool of home-buyers. This appreciation in value led large numbers of homeowners to borrow against their homes as an apparent windfall and this bubble would be burst by a rising Single-Family Residential Mortgages Delinquency Rate. The high delinquency rates led to a devaluation of financial instruments. As the value of these assets plummeted, the market for these securities evaporated, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15,2008. In spite of trillions paid out by the US federal government, the resulting decrease in buyers caused housing prices to plummet. While the collapse of financial institutions was prevented by the bailout of banks by national governments. In many areas, the market also suffered, resulting in evictions, foreclosures. The bursting of the US housing bubble, which peaked at the end of 2006, caused the values of securities tied to US real estate pricing to plummet, damaging financial institutions globally. Questions regarding bank solvency, declines in credit availability, and damaged investor confidence affected global stock markets, economies worldwide slowed during this period, as credit tightened and international trade declined

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Mark Spitznagel
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Mark Spitznagel is an American hedge fund manager, stocks and commodities trader, and author. Spitznagel “gained credibility in the investment world by predicting two market routs in the past decade, first in 2000 and then in 2008, ” as well as predicting the “2000s commodities boom. Spitznagel is the founder, owner, and Chief Investment Officer of the hedge fund management company Universa Investments, L. P. based in Miami. Prior to becoming a hedge fund manager, Spitznagel had been an independent pit-trader at the Chicago Board of Trade, Spitznagel has a graduate degree in Mathematics from New York University and undergraduate from Kalamazoo College. Spitznagel built a farm in Michigan, Idyll Farms, that pastures dairy goats. He is the author of the 2013 book The Dao of Capital, called by Forbes magazine “one of the most important books of the year, senator Rand Paul—including as Senior Economic Advisor. According to Malcolm Gladwell, “Spitznagel is blond and from the Midwest and does yoga. He exudes a certain laconic levelheadedness. ”Nassim Taleb likened Spitznagel to Herbert von Karajan in sartorial appearance and said Spitznagel invests “like a German engineer, fearless and with an iron discipline. ”Forbes described the “unruffled, ” loafered Spitznagel as looking “better prepared for a race than for doomsday. ”As Richard Bradley wrote, “You wouldn’t call Spitznagel warm and fuzzy, he’s not the kind of guy who’ll greet you with a bear hug. But he’s funny in a dry, understated way, thoughtful, asked a question, he’s more interested in delivering a genuine answer than one intended to reflect well upon him. “Spitznagel is unusual not just because of how he invests, but how he lives—far from the hedge fund milieu of Wall Street. In 2014, Spitznagel moved his hedge fund Universa from Los Angeles to Miami, citing Florida’s “more hospitable business, Spitznagel was among the first in a growing list of prominent hedge fund managers moving their operations to Florida. It reported in 2011 that Spitznagel seeded his family office with $100 million, in 2014, Spitznagel’s older brother Eric wrote a humorous article in The New York Times Magazine about Mark and the death of their father. Spitznagel has said that over the years he has gained much investment insight from studying “the holy game of poker. ”When once asked how to become an investor, Spitznagel responded, The most valuable things you’ll need to learn to be good at investing are patience, resilience. You aren’t just going to learn these in school and my best financial advice, practice yoga. In 2007, Spitznagel founded the hedge fund Universa Investments, where he is the Chief Investment Officer, and which specializes in profiting from extreme market risk. Spitznagel has said that he specifically targets very “lumpy returns” in his trading which he says “ultimately keep away competitors. ”As Spitznagel describes the “extreme asymmetric payoffs” of his approach, but, ultimately, we win the wars. Spitznagel considers his tail-hedge strategy “a less conventional and somewhat more exotic” form of safe haven investment. ”Spitznagel calls himself “a hedge fund manager that actually hedges for his clients and this is something of an old fashioned idea in this day of just gambling on the next Fed bailout. He has said that his strategy specifically allows his investors to be “responsibly long” the stock market, in a 2015 video, Spitznagel explains how the “asymmetry” of his payoff allows his investors to do well “in both up and down markets, ” with lower risk

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Nicholas Taleb
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a fund manager. He criticized the management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises. He advocates what he calls a black swan robust society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events, Taleb was born in Amioun, Lebanon to Minerva Ghosn and Najib Taleb, a physician/oncologist and a researcher in anthropology. His parents were Greek Orthodox Lebanese with French citizenship, and he attended a French school there and his family saw its political prominence and wealth reduced by the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975. Taleb received his bachelor and master of science degrees from the University of Paris, Taleb has been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader, He is a scientific adviser at Universa Investments. Taleb considers himself less a businessman than an epistemologist of randomness, Taleb was a pioneer of tail risk hedging, which is intended to mitigate investors exposure to extreme market moves. Following this crisis, Taleb became an activist for what he called a black swan robust society, some of its separate funds made returns of 65% to 115% in October 2008. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, Taleb claimed he retired from trading in 2004, however, Taleb describes the nature of his involvement as totally passive from 2010 on. He has been Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering and he was Distinguished Research Scholar at the Said Business School BT Center, University of Oxford. He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute and his first non-technical book, Fooled by Randomness, about the underestimation of the role of randomness in life, published in 2001, was selected by Fortune as one of the smartest 75 books known. His second non-technical book, The Black Swan, about events, was published in 2007. It spent 36 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list,17 as hardcover and 19 weeks as paperback, the book has been credited with predicting the banking and economic crisis of 2008. A book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes, Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, was released in December 2010, the fourth book of his Incerto series—Antifragile, Things That Gain from Disorder—was published in November 2012. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile, antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same, the antifragile gets better, Talebs non-technical writing style has been described as mixing a narrative, often semi-autobiographical style with short philosophical tales and historical and scientific commentary. The sales of Talebs first two books garnered an advance of $4 million for a book on anti-fragility

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Finance
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Finance is a field that deals with the study of investments. It includes the dynamics of assets and liabilities over time under conditions of different degrees of uncertainty, Finance can also be defined as the science of money management. Finance aims to price assets based on their level and their expected rate of return. Finance can be broken into three different sub-categories, public finance, corporate finance and personal finance. g, health and property insurance, investing and saving for retirement. Personal finance may also involve paying for a loan, or debt obligations, net worth is a persons balance sheet, calculated by adding up all assets under that persons control, minus all liabilities of the household, at one point in time. Household cash flow totals up all the sources of income within a year. From this analysis, the financial planner can determine to what degree, adequate protection, the analysis of how to protect a household from unforeseen risks. These risks can be divided into the following, liability, property, death, disability, health, some of these risks may be self-insurable, while most will require the purchase of an insurance contract. Determining how much insurance to get, at the most cost effective terms requires knowledge of the market for personal insurance, business owners, professionals, athletes and entertainers require specialized insurance professionals to adequately protect themselves. Since insurance also enjoys some tax benefits, utilizing insurance investment products may be a piece of the overall investment planning. Tax planning, typically the income tax is the single largest expense in a household, managing taxes is not a question of if you will pay taxes, but when and how much. Government gives many incentives in the form of tax deductions and credits, most modern governments use a progressive tax. Typically, as ones income grows, a marginal rate of tax must be paid. Understanding how to take advantage of the tax breaks when planning ones personal finances can make a significant impact in which it can later save you money in the long term. Investment and accumulation goals, planning how to accumulate enough money - for large purchases, major reasons to accumulate assets include, purchasing a house or car, starting a business, paying for education expenses, and saving for retirement. Achieving these goals requires projecting what they will cost, and when you need to withdraw funds that will be necessary to be able to achieve these goals, a major risk to the household in achieving their accumulation goal is the rate of price increases over time, or inflation. Using net present value calculators, the planner will suggest a combination of asset earmarking. In order to overcome the rate of inflation, the investment portfolio has to get a higher rate of return, managing these portfolio risks is most often accomplished using asset allocation, which seeks to diversify investment risk and opportunity

Investment fund
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An investment fund is a way of investing money alongside other investors in order to benefit from the inherent advantages of working as part of a group. e. Lower transaction costs, increase the asset diversification to reduce some unsystematic risk, terminology varies with country but investment funds are often referred to as investment pools, coll

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The values and performance of collective funds are listed in newspapers

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Financial market participants

2007-2008 financial crisis
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Excessive risk-taking by banks such as Lehman Brothers helped to magnify the financial impact globally. Massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other monetary and fiscal policies were employed to prevent a possible collapse of the worlds financial system. The crisis was followed by a global economic downturn, the Great Recession. The Europe

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A protester on Wall Street in the wake of the AIG bonus payments controversy is interviewed by news media.

Mark Spitznagel
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Mark Spitznagel is an American hedge fund manager, stocks and commodities trader, and author. Spitznagel “gained credibility in the investment world by predicting two market routs in the past decade, first in 2000 and then in 2008, ” as well as predicting the “2000s commodities boom. Spitznagel is the founder, owner, and Chief Investment Officer of

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Mark Spitznagel

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The Dao of Capital Wiley (2013)

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Idyll Farms complex in Northport, Michigan

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Ron Paul, Spitznagel, and P.J. O'Rourke in Las Vegas, 2015

Nicholas Taleb
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II. He has also been a pract

1.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Finance
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Finance is a field that deals with the study of investments. It includes the dynamics of assets and liabilities over time under conditions of different degrees of uncertainty, Finance can also be defined as the science of money management. Finance aims to price assets based on their level and their expected rate of return. Finance can be broken int